SEBASTOPOL, CA--Microsoft Excel is a surprisingly flexible application.
But despite its powerful feature set, there is a great deal that Excel
either does not allow you to do -- or does not allow you to do easily --
through
its user interface. For most people, the power of Excel goes largely untapped.
Did you ever want to sort worksheets in a workbook without dragging and
dropping each one individually? Or select a worksheet whose tab was not
shown without scrolling through all the tabs of all the available worksheets?
The way to leapfrog shortcomings like these is by using Visual Basic for
Applications to control Excel programmatically.

Steven Roman's just-released book,
Writing Excel
Macros (O'Reilly, $27.95),
offers a solid introduction to writing VBA macros and programs for Excel
users and programmers unfamiliar with the Excel object model. To really
harness the power of Excel, you need to move beyond the basics of creating
spreadsheets and learn how to write effective VBA macros and programs.

Writing Excel
Macros brings the power of Excel to the surface, exploring
things you can do beyond the menus and dialog boxes.

"Personally, I hate long, wordy, overblown 1000+ page books half of which
seem to be devoted to the author's 'humorous' anecdotes," says author
Steven Roman. "So I wrote Writing Excel Macros in a terse, no-nonsense
manner that is characteristic of all my books. I have tried to put my
experience as a professor (about 20 years) and my experience writing
books (about 30 of them) to work here to create a true learning tool for
my readers."

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